The Origins of Nostalgia

This collection of previously unpublished autobiographical and semi-autobiographical “snippets of experience” written by Svetlana Boym in the final period of her life capture her penchant for seamlessly melding, poetically and dream-like, the intensively personal with the everyday and the world-historical. They illuminate the formative conditions for the thinking which she was to develop into her majestic work on nostalgia.<br/><br/>Importantly, these pieces fill in gaps in understanding the genesis and scope of her take on the world. For readers both familiar with her work and for those new to it, <i>The Origins of Nostalgia </i>will enable our own cultural past as well as that of the former Soviet Union to be viewed in a different light.<br/><br/>